118 chApter three
lives. His silence is finally a pronouncement of metaphysical guilt, of what
Karl Jaspers (2001) defined as the guilt of staying alive despite the other’s
suffering or death. By elaborating this form of guilt, Jaspers (notably a lib-
eral himself ) specifically attempted to make sense of the German situation
by charting the registers of German guilt and responsibility in the aftermath
of the Holocaust. Metaphysical guilt is a universal guilt shared by those who
chose to live rather than to sacrifice themselves in protest of Nazi atrocities.
For Singh, his own guilt is born from the realization of his largely uncon-
scious decision to thrive despite the state sacrifice of the adivasi tribes. In
this sense, the story represents the argument advanced by Hannah Arendt
(1976) and Giorgio Agamben (1998) that we come to understand the human
only when it is deprived of every other thing but bare life.^8
Witnessing bare life, Singh registers the force and paradox of human-
ity only at the moment when the unthinkable body of the other reveals to
him the forms of oppression that constitute his own suddenly estranging
body. He relinquishes his claims to knowledge and truth, staging a radical
act of antimastery by submitting himself both physically and psychically to
the thoroughly dehumanized “objects” of his humanitarian aims. Singh’s
desperate desire at the end of the story is to utter “the howl of a demented
dog,” a howl that would signify his “liberation” by becoming animal and
descending into madness. It is important here that this submission is also
a desire for transspeciation; he does not submit himself to becoming other
as a pygmy human but to becoming animal. His desire to howl is therefore
a desire to escape altogether the psychic structures of dehumanization by
leaving the human behind completely. But Singh’s muteness disables this
descent; he is left in the final moments of the story with an inability to
claim (through the howl) an “inhuman” psychic life and an inability to con-
tinue verbally to sustain his own alibi. Surrendering himself to the sound
and touch of his ghosts, Singh brings us to the threshold of other psychic
and narrative possibilities.
After the Humanitarian
Posthumanitarian fictions uncover humanitarian fetishism by refusing to
separate the ideological fantasies of “doing good” from the material sup-
ports and consequences of those actions. They compel readers to linger
with dehumanization, not to repudiate it uncritically but to abide by it,